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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Spain has begun deportation proceedings against Imran Firasat, a Christian refugee from Pakistan, for making a documentary about Mohammed and thereby threatening the national security of Spain. If Firasat is deported back to Pakistan, he will face the death penalty proving that it's a short step from the Spanish Inquisition to the Pakistani Inquisition.

The United States has a man sitting in prison for making another blasphemous movie, which the government spent weeks blaming for worldwide attacks on American embassies. And he isn't the first man persecuted or prosecuted for offending Islam. Offending Islam has become a national security issue involving all levels of government.

When Bubba the Love Sponge, a Tampa DJ, proposed to burn a Koran, the commander of the Afghanistan war contacted his girlfriend, who would later be stalked by Petraeus' girlfriend, to contact the Mayor of Tampa to keep Bubba from burning a Koran. Instead of explaining how the American system works to the Lebanese temptress and her four-star general, the mayor wrote back that the city was working on it.

That month 50 percent more Americans were killed in Afghanistan in the long slow death march of the war, but a Koran was not burned in Tampa. Mission accomplished.

Muslims did not have to kill a great number of Americans to enforce blasphemy law in this country. Counting the various reactions to burnt Korans, rumors of a flushed Koran and assorted things of that nature, the number is still well below a hundred. Even counting every casualty in the war from September 11 onward, it took fewer deaths to make the United States give up on the Bill of Rights than it took to liberate it in the War of Independence.

But it's not really about the deaths, if it were then the United States wouldn't be senselessly squandering the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan to avoid offending the natives. It's not the death of men that our leaders are worried about, but the death of stability.

Knowing that a hundred men will die today in car accidents does not alarm anyone, but knowing that somewhere a dozen men might die in a bomb explosion, anywhere and at any time, can bring a nations to its knees. That is the difference between predictable and unpredictable death. Predictable death makes it possible for most everyone to go about doing what they normally do. Unpredictable death however erodes daily order.

Blasphemy makes terrorism seem predictable. It delivers that false sense of control that is at the root of Stockholm Syndrome, the seductive illusion that the thug can be reasoned with and that we can restore control over our perilous environment by accepting responsibility for the enemy's violence. If we meet a set of conditions then we will have peace. And what kind of lunatic wouldn't want peace? The kind who needs to be deported or locked up in the name of peace.

When an entire country goes Stockholm then it is no longer interested in winning the war, only in surviving the peace. In a Stockholm country, national security consists of locking up anyone who can be blamed for sabotaging the peacemaking. The less peace there is, the more the peacemakers go on the hunt for "extremists" who are to blame for the lack of it. The more their vision of a better world fails, the more stern measures they must take against their own people. Peace is always one more denunciation of extremism away.

The same countries whose leaders have spent a century and a half blathering incessantly about a truly progressive order under international law have shown no ability to cope with the old-fashioned kind of war. They can quote verbatim the laws of war, but understand poorly that war makes its own laws. War's simplest law is that you pick a pretext, any popular pretext, make your demands and then go on the attack. If the other side is foolish enough to meet your demands, then it has shown its weakness and must be attacked again and again.

Muslims have restored blasphemy prosecutions to the United States and Europe through violence. Like Khrushchev banging his shoe on the United Nations delegate desk, they did their best to convince the rest of the world that they were violently irrational and liable to do all sorts of things if their demands weren't met. And their demands were met. Rather than going medieval on their asses, the civilized world instead went medieval on anyone who offended the medieval cult of Islam.

Muslim blasphemy, like the ghetto hood's respect is an assertion of supremacy by identity. It isn't a grievance, it's a right of violence, and if you give into it, then you accept the inferior status that comes from being weak in a system where might makes right and killing people, or threatening to, is what makes one man better than another.

Islam is submission. If you submit to Islam, then you're a Muslim. If you submit to a Muslim, then you're a slave. The western blasphemy trial is not the enforced submission of an Islamic legal system that would be crude and brutal, but at least comparatively respectable, it is the enforced submission to Muslim violence. The judges who preside over our blasphemy cases do not believe in Islam, they believe in the danger of Muslim violence. This is not theocracy, it is slavery.

For the moment blasphemy prosecutions still involve trying offenders on some charge other than the obvious one. Low-hanging fruit like Imran Firasat or Mark Youssef are the easiest to deal with. Any man whose freedom depends on the whim of a judge can already be locked up or deported any time without the need for actual charges of heresy to be brought. When that isn't possible, there is always the ubiquitous hate crime which increasingly extends to anything that offends anyone regardless of consequences or intent.

These trials are a contradiction, 21st Century legal codes built on sensitivity and tolerance being used to prosecute deviations from a medieval code of insensitivity and intolerance. But that very same contradiction runs through the modern state's entire approach to Islam. It is impossible to embrace medievalism without becoming medieval. The need to accommodate Islamic medievalism is forcing the medievalization of the modern world's political and legal systems.

The conflict between the modern world and the Muslim world is being waged by the modern rules of international law and peacemaking on one side and by the medieval rules of brutal violence, insincere offers of peace and bigoted fanaticism on the other. Rather than fighting it on its own terms, the modern world is instead trying to accommodate it on its own terms by accommodating its blasphemy codes.

Trapped in a long-term war, our leaders are looking for ways of making the conflict more manageable. If they can't win the war, they can at least limit the number of attacks. It's not the open book kind of appeasement, but the double book kind. The open book is still patriotic, but the second book in the bottom drawer is running payments to the terrorists and finding ways to accommodate them. And anyone who runs afoul of the second book, also runs afoul of national security.

War often compromises freedoms, but it rarely compromises the freedom to hurt the enemy's feelings. But this is a different sort of war. A war with no enemies and no hope of victory. A war whose only hope is that one day our enemies will become better people and stop trying to kill us. Our enemies are fighting to take away our freedoms and we are fighting to take away our own freedoms in the hopes that if we give up some of them to the enemy, he will settle for them and give up on the rest.

In this sort of war, blasphemy is a serious national security threat, not because it truly is, but because our leaders desperately need their Stockholm control points of appeasement, they need to believe that if they crack down on Koran burnings then they can reduce the fighting by 5 percent or 8 percent and that gives them hope that they can one day reduce it by 100 percent.

The actual numbers don't matter. On the month after Bubba the Love Sponge did not burn the Koran, 50 percent more Americans died in Afghanistan, but the statisticians can always argue that if he had burned it, then 75 percent more or 100 percent more would have died. Islam runs on magical thinking and any effort to appease it must also embrace that same medieval magical thinking. Hoping that blasphemy prosecutions will reduce violence, is psychologically less of a strain than accepting that nothing will, that there is no magic bullet, only regular bullets.

The sort of men who deport filmmakers, when they aren't locking them up, and treat the stunts of shock jocks as a matter of national security, fail to understand that they are not fighting some vague notion of "extremism" which is fed by "extreme" language and actions, but an organized ideology whose goal is not merely preventing Bubba the Love Sponge from burning the Koran, but compelling the Mayor of Tampa and the American commander in Afghanistan to compel Bubba not to burn a Koran.

Islamists have not launched a thousand years war over Bubba; they have done it so that the cities and countries where Bubba and Imran live submit to Islam. Locking up filmmakers and warning off DJ's is not quite up to Saudi and Iranian standards of submission, but it's a start. Once the principle has been established, then the rest is a matter of negotiation. And the negotiations always begin and end with a bang.

There are two laws that govern men; the law of faith and the law of force. The law of faith is followed when you do a thing because you believe it to be right. The law of force is followed when you compel others to do a thing or are compelled to do it by them. Faith at its strongest is more enduring than force, and yet force can be used to change faith.

America has lived under the law of faith, following the laws that it believed to be right. Islam conducts its affairs under the law of force, as it has since the days of Mohammed. American leaders are abandoning their laws of faith to force, giving up on freedom of speech to accommodate the violence of Islam, while forgetting that when you give up faith to force, then you also abandon any further reason to resist that force. Without faith, it is easier to let force win.

Winston Churchill, 'a great British patriot and statesman' had said the following:“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last” ONLY TO FIND THAT SHE (AMERICA) IS NEXT.Miladmea@yahoo.com

In it's 1000 year quest to be the most antisemitic nation in Europe, Spain has merely shifted their rationale for that. Sometimes it was the Church, sometimes fascism, now it's Islam. It doesn't really matter what the reason is.

I'm a hardcore Catholic Crusader who believes in the 230 grain 45 caliber HP bullet to appease our enemies. It makes my hair stand up when I see the way the government bends over backwards to Muslim threats. The Church would like to live in harmony but that will never happen. In the end, Catholics worldwide will have to fight if they want to survive the Muslim assault.

DennisAs a hardcore Atheist, I too am on the Muslim must kill list. I would much rather have a strong Catholic Church that leaves me alone than live in a Muslim nation that want my death. So, I have your back.

Mr. Latham, The Catholic Church has already 'bent over' and gushingly validated Islam. Read your Catechism #841. Islam is not a way of salvation, but from its beginning, and written in its core texts, is an opponent to Judeo-Christian theological doctrine and human rights ethics and operates in the spirit of anti-Christ...its fruit is the opposite of the Fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Well, well. A spade really is a spade after all. It is refreshing to find so cogent a piece on the vile thing that is Islam.

I think that the game is already over, and it was not even a close contest because when America sold its soul to progressivism, it became blind to reality and unable to deal with truth in any form. We have warmly embraced secular humanism and refused to have God in our national thinking. Consequently, recognizing Islam for what it is--the legions of Satan--and standing against it with whatever force is required is not possible. There is most assuredly a battle raging in the earth between Good and Evil, and it looks like Good is about to throw in the towel.

This sensitive mayor of Tampa, Bob Buckhorn (a distinctively second string political hack) has a peculiar fondness for saying sexually crude things about Republican women to newspaper reporters. He giggled in the ever-so-politically correct New York Times about a sick stunt in which a local strip club offered up a simulated Sarah Palin stripper whom you could folder and sexually abuse as she stayed in character -- as close to simulated rape as anything since Obama's speechwriter team drunkenly mauled the breasts of a cardboard Hillary Clinton cutout in 2008.

There must be no Republican women in the Koran. And no feminists at the New York Times, which ran Buckhorn's gleeful "nailin Palin" commentary as a color story.

But thank goodness Mayor Bucky's on top of this Bubba the Love Sponge thing. Of course, the fact that Bubba routinely uses words like b***h and c**t to describe women has not stimulated any known members of Petreus' harem to whinge to city hall about decorum.

Some hate speech is just more equal than other hate speech. The funny logic is its inevitable zero-sum quality: in order to elevate some speech and some identities, you must demean others. Women tend to hit the gutter fastest.

Tampa, meanwhile is richly earning its reputation as Peyton Place with Pirates and weirdly tanned political hacks.

The elixir of post-colonial guilt combined with post-modern mindlessness have created armies of stoned American morons who bow and scrape before misogynistic, violent savages motivated by endless repetitions of hate-filled slogans. These savages are warned repeatedly that it is evil to use critical thought to analyze the sacred slogans in any way. This is called ‘blind following’ (taqlid). A great Saudi novelist, Turki Hamad, who analyzed all this is presently languishing in a Saudi jail, arrested for blasphemy. Hamad sounded the trumpet call to Muslims to THINK for a change: “9/11 was the consequence of a chronic disease in the Arab psyche...a culture of illusion...It is an illusion when we think that all the world is against us, and [an] illusion when we think that there will not be any existence for us without the perishing of the others. It is illusion when we have either to get the best for ourselves or we have to die. According to this logic either we possess all the rain or let the rain to be stopped if we were thirsty. It is also an illusion if we think that the past is the route to the future and it is illusion if we think that the world without us will not be able to survive; for this reason they compete against each other to exploit us like hyenas struggling for their prey. The greater illusion is that we are God's angels on His land and all the rest of the world are devils.”Turki Hamad GETS IT...Islam is monumentally stupid...a moronic mirage. We should do our utmost to get him out of jail and all other writers who have insight into the stupidities of contemporary thought. Support Turki Hamad.

Bob Moore,"...There is most assuredly a battle raging in the earth between Good and Evil, and it looks like Good is about to throw in the towel."

Excellent post and good point sir.

One minor disagreement though... "Good" = GOD, and God has promised He "...will never abandon nor forsake..." us. It is we flawed and broken humans who are abandoning & forsaking HIM in droves... We are far, far too much in love with our sin to allow him room...

An excellent column, however, I have one major reservation, which is Daniel's premise that "faith" in "what one believes is right" is a means of opposing Islamic force:

"There are two laws that govern men; the law of faith and the law of force….The law of faith is followed when you do a thing because you believe it to be right….Faith at its strongest is more enduring than force, and yet force can be used to change faith….America has lived under the law of faith, following the laws that it believed to be right…."

America was not founded on "faith." It was founded on the conviction – substantiated by Western thinkers such as Aristotle and John Locke, who were observing reality and man – that men are "endowed by their Creator" (or by nature, not even the Founders dared in their time to remove a ghost from being the author of all things, he just created everything and then took a hike) with certain requirements to live happily on earth. There was nothing wrong with their metaphysics or epistemology. They were mentally healthier than most men are today. Their minds were fixed on reality, not ethereal realms that could not be proven or validated. If they hadn't been so reality-oriented, we'd still be stuck in the Medieval period. As Muslims are with their obsessions with conquest and Sharia.

One may act on conviction – that is, on the evidence of one's senses and one's rational moral premises and one's sense of justice – but one shouldn't trust anyone who acts on "faith," because that person hasn't validated his "conviction" with reason. A person acting on faith might by happenstance "do the right thing," but that's merely coincidence, and can't be consistent, because it will clash inevitably and ultimately with that part of his character based on the evidence of his senses.

It was the emerging concept of individual rights and liberty beginning in the Renaissance that finally vanquished, in the West, the Christian version of Islam, which impoverished Europe for centuries, and finally rendered institutions such as the Inquisition (which the Church finally disowned only early in the 19th century) as barbaric and Medieval.

I have enormous respect for Mr. Greenfield's commentaries, and the current article is among his best, except for his concluding paragraphs. I completely agree with the comments of Ed Cline, and , respectfully, refer Mr. Greenfield to Ayn Rand's lecture: "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World." This lecture can be heard for free at: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reg_ar_faith_and_force

The published article is contained in her book "Philosophy Who Needs it."

Bob Moore,"...There is most assuredly a battle raging in the earth between Good and Evil, and it looks like Good is about to throw in the towel."

Excellent post and good point sir.

One minor disagreement though... "Good" = GOD, and God has promised He "...will never abandon nor forsake..." us. It is we flawed and broken humans who are abandoning & forsaking HIM in droves... We are far, far too much in love with our sin to allow him room...

Apologies. A poor choice of words on my part. Having read the Book I know who wins in the end. What I meant to convey is not that God is about to throw in the towel, but that the country as a whole is. Those who are His will remain His (John 10:28, Matthew 7:14), but sadly the majority are more like the ones found in Matthew 7:18 and following.

There is no battle between good and evil at all.God is in charge. All things are simply as he allows them to be for the time being and for the education of man who decided long ago that he did not need a God.Evil is the result of the absence of God in men's minds.

Great article, Not only in America but all over the world some cowardice leaders put their countrymen in harms way, excusing muslims for their savage behavior. Islam, not so much the religion of peace. God Bless all Real Freedom Fighting Patriots!